Greetings once again, my fellow luxuriants of the ludicrous, to another edition of Reviews You’ll Never Use. This week, let’s dip our toes into another great and underappreciated genre of film, Hong Kong wuxia (kung fu) films of the 70s & 80s. Today we’ll be taking a look at 天龍八部, or as you round-eyed devils have dubbed it, The Battle Wizard.
I must profess to having a soft place in my heart for old trashy kung fu movies. Those of you my age or a bit older probably remember these as being staples on late-night cable, when they were just trying to fill air space. The silly dubbing, ham-fisted acting, convoluted story lines, and most importantly, the high-flying martial arts action are ambrosia for the aficionado of trash cinema.
And brother, The Battle Wizard delivers on all these fronts. It’s a Shaw Bros. production, which may not mean anything to you, until I tell you that if you ever saw a fucked up cheesy Technicolor kung fu movie on tv at 2 a.m., it was probably from this production company. This particular film is based on a serialized novel whose title variously translates as Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils or Eight Books of the Heavenly Dragon. The novel deals in archetypes based on Buddhist cosmology, so it’s all a bit complicated to explain in a blog post.
The film opens with a guy getting caught in bed with his mistress, by her husband. Rookie mistake. Of course they immediately fight, but it turns out the philanderer has mastered the ancient martial art technique of shooting lasers out of your finger. He shoots the husband in the knees, and then as he tries to flee, injured, he gets shot again by the finger laser, which results in both of his legs falling off below the knee. Somehow the husband disappears over the roof, running away on his stubs. Back inside, the philanderer’s wife reveals to his side-piece that he’s actually a prince and could never marry gutter trash like her. Take THAT, bitch!
Twenty years later, we cut to an underground cave. The cuckold has built extendable iron bird-legs for himself that can destroy rocks, because of course he has. He’s hanging out with a half-human reptile-man of some sort, whose provenance is never explained. Through the magic of exposition, we learn that Prince Philanderer is now king, and has a boy. Killing the son should be just the revenge Iron Bird Legs is looking for, so he dispatches Reptile to the surface world to enact his revenge labor for him.
On the other side of the street, Gutter Trash’s daughter by Prince Philanderer is all grown up, and has mastered the ancient martial arts technique of firing lasers out of the end of an oversized novelty thigh bone. Her mother sends her out into the world to enact her revenge labor, on Prince Philanderer’s wife. She also tells Bone Shooter to always veil her face, because all men are worthless scum. See, SJWs aren’t new, they even existed in China 1,000 years ago.
MEANWHILE, AT THE HALL OF JUSTICE, sonny-boy is moping about because his old man, now King Philanderer, is trying to make him study kung fu. All the boy wants to do is read old Chinese sages and be a scholar-philosopher. After fighting with his parents over it (who claim that no one can govern unless they can also kick ass), he sullenly runs away to prove that you don’t have to be Chuck Norris to make it in the world.
Here’s where shit really starts to get weird. Deep breath: he meets a woman who can mind-control snakes and kicks his ass because she knows kung fu. They’re captured by bandits, but Snake Woman uses her powers to help Pacifist Son escape. She sends him to find a particular woman that can rescue her. Pacifist Son asks several wanderers in the forest, and eventually learns that the chick is a hated witch. Heart in throat he approaches her hideout to beg for help for Snake Woman. Turns out, the witch is Bone Shooter. What a twist! So Bone Shooter shows up, kills the bandits, frees Snake Woman (who promptly fucks right off until near the end of the film), and has to allow Pacifist Son to see her face because he sucked poison out of her wound sustained during the fight with the bandits. They’re then ambushed by Reptile, but survive because it turns out a giant red snake lives in the river and because it ate nothing but ginseng and deer antlers it’s whole life, it somehow grants magic super martial arts powers to anybody who drinks it’s blood (I swear that is the exact explanation given in the film). So in desperation Pacifist Son bites the snake and drinks it’s blood, sending Reptile scurrying back to tell Iron Bird Legs about this intriguing development. Pacifist Son and Bone Shooter go back to the palace because they want to get married, but find out they’re half-siblings through King Philanderer. Iron Bird Legs springs an ambush and captures Pacifist Son and Bone Shooter, throwing them into a pit (after an awkwardly weird scene of Reptile stripping and fondling the woman) where they have to fight a super-strong man in a cheap gorilla costume. Pacifist Son uses his snake invincibility to eat a magic poisonous frog that Snake Woman had given him earlier; this somehow makes him go Super Saiyan, and he defeats the magic carnivorous gorilla and escapes from the pit. There’s a final show-down with Bone Shooter, Snake Woman, Reptile, Pacifist Son, and Iron Bird Legs, where everybody shoots a shit-ton of lasers out of their hands at each other. Eventually the good guys kill all the bad guys, the end.
This is an amusing diversion for a variety of reasons. The effects are, of course, garish and silly by today’s standards, but I profess a certain fondness for the earnestness of the efforts of people burdened by a lack of both money, and skill. The plot is simply marvelous. Everyone trying to get revenge on everyone else, magical beings all over the place, the most crowded fucking forest I’ve ever seen in my life. The most interesting aspect to me, though, is the explicit turning of the usual trope of the weakling Chinese valuing faggoty scholarship in the classics over the vigorous manly martial valor that we value in the West. In this movie, the protagonist explicitly tries to be the very model of a perfect Confucian ruler, and is ridiculed for it, and basically gives up on it like 15 minutes into the film when he first agrees to let Snake Woman try and teach him kung fu.
If you’re already partial to this kind of film, you’ll love it. It’s got everything you could ever want from a 1970s low-budget Hong Kong import, including a hilarious scene of a horse falling to it’s death over a cliff. If you don’t already like this kind of film, it has nothing for you that would make you change your mind. I rate this film 3.5 Glowing Hands out of 7. Props to anybody who can name the movie this image is from without looking it up.
Comments
169 responses to “Reviews You’ll Never Use: The Battle Wizard”
Ok, way to use the thicc Asian girl photos to get clicks.
He did this last week too and I think that’s a hangable offense.
I remember that now. What the fuck hell happened to thicc Thursdays? I’m tired of this secrecy from the Deep Glib!
Frankly, I found the “photos of people most of the Glibertarians fap to” posts getting as tedious as the “photos of people Jesse faps to” posts.
And now you all know that Ted is our secret donor.
He’s the Koch Brothers of Z-list political blogs.
Just imagine if Crusty had been persuaded to wander over.
No, he’s went full on Cosmo now, it’s like the fucking Cosmo Borg over there. Seriously, I don’t know, I only visit/comment a couple times a week at best.
I still give them a dozen views a week or so and comment on Brickbats, mostly to give Oliver shit for being so lazy that he can’t even muster up enough effort to post the simplest article of the day.
It’s funny how Mary/DanO has become the default white knight of the staff. I wasn’t around for those days but based on the stories I’ve heard that completely threw me for a loop.
They have some great articles between the TDS. That’s why I still visit at least a couple times a week. I thought that DanO is shreek’s new handle, after he famously became the first and only person to ever get Catassed at Glibs.
I’m there pretty much all day because Glibs is blocked at work.
It’s… interesting.
The story I heard was DanO made an appearance right after Shika retweeted one of Mary’s posts and/or the exodus. Chip your pets is Tulpa, and shreek was so fucking irritating that he got his addictionmyth and dajjal socks banned, sulked for a bit, and is back as buttblug.
When did this catass occur? Have a link?
DanO/Kizone/Mary signed up here under the handle Cuffy Migs.
It was unable to behave itself, so we banned it.
Oh, and Buttplug was banned immediately after he registered.
Just because you only fap to olden time black and white movies doesn’t give you the right to look down on us Ted.
Bitch, please. I hit puberty right when internet porn came into being. None of my Manly Mondays have been nearly grotesque enough perversions of human sexuality to be fappable.
Challenge accepted.
I miss Thick Thursdays.
Yeah, the part I miss most is that as soon as I clicked to open it and started scrolling, my wife would walk by and go ‘OMG! Her ass is big! You really love big asses… don’t you think that’s too big? My ass isn’t that big!’.
Kind of like when my gf thinks it’s funny to sneak up on me while I’m watching porn, like I’m fucking 16.
That’s messed up, yo. I hope there’s some sort of revenge involved
My wife likes to try to embarrass me like that also. I don’t know why. Women are weird.
“You own it now”
Your wife sounds pretty cool.
Yeah, unless I forgot to take out the garbage. She’s takes that shit seriously, lol.
Ordem e progresso, a bunda faz successo. Nádegas a declarar.
Order and progress my fucking ‘ass’!
He’s been doing it since the end of Thicc Thursdays, frankly it’s horrific false advertising.
Everybody was kung fu fighting
Hunh!
Those cats were fast as lighning.
I play that on the juke box every once in a while. The old dudes love it.
Who’s the chick on the front page
Thicc Asian Lobster Girl.
Comment from the other place
Troy muy grande boner|5.18.17 @ 6:10PM|#
So Reason has gone from the side-boob of Lobster girl to the side boob of a fucking freak named Chelsea Manning. Awesome. Just awesome.
WTF? Are you telling me they’ve taken time out enough from TDS to talk about Chelsea?
I think there needs to be a poll. Who’s the mostest coolest identify as a woman now so I can maybe get out of prison, is it Chelsea or Caitlyn? Must be something about C names that get you more empathy.
I thought it was because they were so ugly.
Well, I mean I guess we have to weigh the evidence. ‘Chelsea’ is about to spend a shitload of time in a military prison as a deserter and traitor, and ‘Caitlyn’ is about to get convicted of killing someone in a car crash.
I rest my case.
So will they both get professorships or just one of them?
The visual style of those glowing hand pics reminds me of Girl on a Motorcyle (a hilariously awful movie), but it’s not from that.
Marianne Faithfull getting up there in the years
Well, it has been 48 or 49 years. So, you know, gravity.
Thigh-bone gun girl, was she the actress spliced into Kung Pow! Enter the Fist, or am I just being racist?
Sorry, but you’re officially lacist.
The girl from Kung Pow is Ling-Ling Hsieh, whereas this chick is Chen Chi Lin.
Ah, good. I was afraid my home’s close proximity to hipsters had exposed me to the horrific effects of secondhand-woke.
HA! secondhand-woke. stealing that
Oh yes, I think I can get Mr. Riven to watch this with me. 🙂 … And then we can rewatch House. Man, that was such a grand evening.
MLB suspended Kevin Pillar for 2 games for calling a Braves pitcher “an anti-gay slur”.
ESPN writer says it’s deserved. Fine, whatever. But the comments, oh man:
Study A. Write
Works at San fransisco golf club
“see noam chimsky, an awesome linguist. also, congress is giving thought to suspending president trump for the many slurs he used prior to and after becoming the president. and, finally, major league baseball is giving thought to suspending ty cobb, posthumanously, for his many slurs during and after games.
i really like the idea of” todays society”, as compared to past societies, these people have not been near a university campus, the local tavern, the high school, a fast food restaurant and heard the thoughts of the people who frequent this environment. to suggest todays society is superior to another time is extremely naive and borderline social psychotic. people want to honestly believe the sociey has changed from 1200 a,d,, it has not. just ask the slave drivers.”
Can we please just start shooting each other already? This death by 1000 retarded cuts is too much for me.
Ah, yes, Noam Chimsky! His Ginerative Grammar framework is well-known.
Is that how one speaks after drinking a fifth of Gin?
I dunno.
I’m still doing research on that.
You should apply for a grant
He works at the golf course, so I read the whole comment in Bill Murray’s character from Caddyshack
+1 total consciousness
How long would it take Noam Chimpsky complete the works of Shakespeare on a typewriter by hitting random keys?
It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times?
I feel my reference to Bull Durham’s “Cocksucker” scene was really unappreciated here.
I had to go watch the whole movie. Just got back. I appreciated it.
lol. Its a great movie. Susan Sarandon, however one may feel about her now, was hot.
Ha! It’s on STARZ as I type this.
*unzip*
Starz tackles the “hottest gay sex scene” to ever air on television
How does this work? The victim complains about being called a fag? Who does that?
Isn’t it usually someone who has nothing to do with the situation being outraged on someone else’s behalf?
I’m guessing it got picked up on a TV hot-mike. i doubt they’d fine/suspend the guy if it was just something heard between players.
Euro-soccer is full of racial “incidents” that start with the victim complaining. I find that a little… unmanly, myself.
Someone from the League, I guess, caught it on the replay. The have a video command center where they have to watch everything in case someone challenges a play
Yeah, it’s bullshit but look at the kids today who have been so pampered and have never learned how to handle any sort of conflict resolution on their own. That’s why they demand safe spaces and speech policing. They’re going to be very unhappy adults. Call the guy an asshole and be done with it.
Yeah, don’t the fans throw bananas at the players?
They’re the type of folks of folks that consider flopping a key to a successful career, No wonder Americans consider Soccer players to be a bunch of Anti-gay slurs.
Remember that sticks and stones thing? I feel like I’m in some alternate universe. I can’t imagine not laughing at someone if they seriously complained about name calling and expected me to care.
Maybe this is the result of pretending that calling someone the “N” word which shall not be named is the worst thing in life. These are just words. Now the taboo vocabulary keeps expanding.
Will they go after Tony Dungy next?
I need to do a Bruce Lee movie marathon soon.
i am also a shaw bros kung-fu fan, but i swear i don’t remember any lasers in the shit i used to watch. it was just 5-finger-death-punches and praying mantis style nuttery.
My favorite shitty-kung-fu-movie special effect =
– when they try to give the impression a guy can jump huge distances by showing then hop, cutting to them basically ‘falling through space’, creating the impression they’re flying through the air, then cutting to them hopping again, as though they just landed after a huge leap.
It was the sort of “fuck it – no one would believe it anyway, so let’s just pretend and the viewers will use their imagination”-sort of thing they routinely did before ‘wire-work’ came in and provided their exact vision of what it was *supposed* to look like.
Wire-work ‘realism’ ruined kung-fu movies for me. I mean, i really liked the Ip-Man style, high-budget, super-technical choreographed stuff…. but the average jet-li movie just bored me. I really liked the ghetto movies because they felt more like ‘comic books’, and required some active suspension of disbelief.
Crouching tiger was not your bag then I take it. (It’s okay I didn’t think it was that amazing either)
I actually thought it was a fun plot and very pretty film
Also Chow Yun Fat is my forever-homie because of Hard Boiled (*itself sort of like an oldschool Kung-Fu movie only with guns instead of fake-punching)
but i hated the fight-sequences and the flying through the trees shit. I also didn’t like…. what was that movie that won lots of awards and had all those scenes with like 100million arrows flying at people? that one. Basically all the new, arty, huge-budget kung-fu movies leave me cold.
I liked Ong-Bak, however
Hero. It is also the kung-fu film with the shittiest message.
Have you seen Chocolate?
“hero”
yes. God that sucked.
“chocolate”
No! looks hot.
The actress is Tony Jaa’s protege. Also the plot is awesome. Autistic girl spends her entire childhood watching Bruce Lee movies.
Or they’ll kick the guy in the chin on the way down. And they move both legs like they’re riding a bicycle the whole time they’re in the air.
Yes! exactly. The ‘second or third’ kicks that make no logical sense. the first would have expended all the force from the flying leap, but somehow they manage to generate new kinetic energy out of nothing while suspended in midair. Classic.
So, WTF is it with Seattle area grunge vocalists? Are the lizards or the Russians out to get them or what? I’m not sure if any of the originals are still alive.
Let’s see:
Kurt Cobain – Nirvana: DEAD 1994
Layne Thomas Staley – Alice in Chains: DEAD 2002
Scott Weiland – Stone Temple Pilots: DEAD 2015
Chris Cornell – Soundgarden: DEAD 2017
Eddie Vedder – Pearl Jam … oh yeah, he sucked anyway, they let him live.
Have you ever listened to grunge?
Yes. I like Alice in Chains, liked some Soundgarden… Wait, there’s a hidden message here…
I wouldn’t put Alice in Chains in that category. Yeah, Black Hole Sun is good tune but who would want to sing it over and over.
I don’t really think of STP as grunge either. I guess I don’t pay that much attention to genres.
Not even obligatory – more a reflexive response
Screw all that self-aborbed introspective crap, bring back the 70’s. Sex party good time hedonistic fun.
70s and 80s was the best music.
Old folks home is that way >>>>>
Don’t worry. I’ll come visit you. Probably.
So… was Obama keeping them alive or something? There seems to be a pretty big gap in that timeline.
Yeah, must have been the Lightbringer.
You left out = Andrew Wood -Mother Love Bone: DEAD 1990
Before it was even cool! HIPSTER KING
I stumbled on this at the Daily Fail. Amy Fisher returns to New York from Florida
‘Long Island Lolita’ Amy Fisher who famously shot the wife of her 35-year-old lover when she was just 16 has returned to New York after her three children were ‘ostracized’ in Florida.
You know what? I still would.
Don’t stick it in crazy. The Golden Rule.
She. Did. Not. Age. Well.
Not yet. Wait a few more drinks and I’ll check again.
Do you have a keg in your backpack?
She looks like she belongs on one of those “real no class housewives of” shows.
Today (May 19) is the 25th anniversary of the shooting.
Chris Cornell expressing the ultimate ownership of one’s life, to end it when YOU SEE FIT. I am pained over his death, but I support his ownership of it.
Jeez, I wasn’t aware of the details. In his hotel after a show. My goodness.
Always have a spotter for auto erotic asphyxiation.
I just saw “suicide by hanging”. What you’re speculating seems… not that.
De mortuis nil nisi bene dicendum.
I always thought he was hot. That’s good, isn’t it?
Meh he killed himself by hanging. I suppose that suicide implies an intentionality, but whatevs.
I think in some of the earlier thread people recommended that if you’re into auto-erotic asphyxiation, you should always have a suicide note around, just in case. “I can’t live in this world anymore. P.S. I used my belt to hang myself, that’s why my pants were around my ankles.” That note would solve a lot of problems.
Auto-erotic asphyxiation is the leading cause of awkward funerals.
It seemed a tad impulsive.
Run Run Shaw, this movie’s producer, said his favorite movies were those that made money
“The Last Mogul” would also make money, because that is what his films did (he said movies that made money were his favourite kind). And then the proceeds would go to charity, just as Sir Run Run gave millions to good causes, increasingly in mainland China.
Oh man, Sho Nuff vs Bruce Leeroy in The Last Dragon. Blaxploitation that could NEVER get made today.
Kiss my Converse!
Speaking of Blaxploitation. Have you seen Black Dynamite? One of my favorites.
“Let me tell you something, sucka. I am blacker than black, blacker than the ace of spades, and when the revolution comes, I’ll be on the front lines, but until then. You need to Shut the Fuck Up, ’cause grown folks is talkin’.
Oh, you comment now?
Where you been?
+1000 ” Cause donuts don’t wear alligator shoes.”
someone linked to this earlier, and i’m only getting around to reading it now =
“”Democratic Leaders Try to Slow Calls to Impeach Trump“‘
It resonates with something that i was thinking of and may have commented about yesterday = i think this idea that the Dem-media has been generating so much froth over – that Trump is ‘impeachable’ in any real sense – is actually a terrible idea for their own team.
I think they recognize this, and that stories like the NYT thing above are some belated effort to tell their snooterati-twitter-journo circles that “remember, we don’t actually have the votes in congress even if there *were* some dirt”.
But i think that important fact is simply not going to get heard below the headlines.
I mean even The Other Site had 3 or 4 stories with “impeachment” in the headline – tho 2 were attempts to downplay its significance…. the message people get regardless of the content is that Impeachment is actually a real possibility. And as the NYT story notes = it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle that politicians want to exploit – eg.
I think what may actually happen is that this whole special-prosecutor thing is going to simply let all the gas out of their Whippet-like-high, and when they have their comedown to reality, they’re going to be *pissed*
the article basically says the same thing. It reminds me of the way the GOP whipped the public into a frenzy over immigration in the late part of the Bush second term… and which voters wanted action on. Failure to deliver on that helped create the Tea Party, and eventually Trump. I don’t know if it will hurt them in the mid-terms, but i do think if it comes around to 2020 and their ‘impeachment’ shit has repeatedly gone nowhere, they will suffer *badly*
The main way it will hurt the Democrats in the mid-terms is it will drive up turn up of actual Trump supporters and people who are pissed about the “everything Trump does is reason to impeach him” crowd. If they keep it up and don’t get anywhere, then their base won’t turn out in 2020 and Trump and anti-anti-Trumpers will deliver the Democrats a huge beat down.
Meh. Traditionally, mid term races favor the opposition. And the Communist base is really, really fired up. I would be surprised if the Dems retake the house, but they will likely pick up a half dozen seats.
I suspect that they lose one Senator.
That makes sense.
I also think it is accelerating things that terrify the democrats – the fragmentation between rank-and-file Prog voters and the ‘democrat establishment’
(the nexxus between the Media, ActBlue, SEIU, AFSCME, various other ‘money’ orgs)
e.g.
There are many leftier-than normal politicians who see opportunity for themselves by screaming at the establishment folks and saying, “You didn’t deliver!!”. Most may not have any impact in the short term… but i think if more and more extreme-lefty pols get into office… the long-term effect on the DNC would be far worse, because it would basically make any sort of ‘compromise candidate’ for president impossible. They would have to be “as lefty as Bernie” if not ‘better’.
i just think its not going to end well for them. I can’t imagine what they will cook up if this ‘Russians’ and ‘impeachment’ shit dries up with zero results.
At least they have “he writes like a 4th grader” to fall back on.
The NY Times are real cock-teasers…the want to arouse the base, but don’t want to go all the way.
BBC Muslim rape gang drama never mentions Islamic identity or motivations of attackers
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2017/05/bbc-muslim-rape-gang-drama-never-mentions-islamic-identity-or-motivations-of-attackers
***
The BBC programme documentary makers behind the show have already been on record as saying they “didn’t want to give these people [the English Defence League] an opportunity” by making the series, and that “there was no religious basis for this”.
***
Shocked. Shocked I tell you.
Them not saying it says it twice as loud
Rape? I assume the motivation was rape.
‘Militant Feminist’ HuffPost Blogger Appointed French Minister for Gender Equality
https://heatst.com/world/militant-feminist-huffpost-blogger-appointed-french-minister-for-gender-equality/
***
A “militant” feminist known for her extensive blogging for the Huffington Post has been given a major position in the new French government.
Marlène Schiappa, a 34-year-old activist, was one of a slew of appointments made in the wake of Emmanuel Macron’s election as the new French president.
Schiappa was handed the cumbersome-sounding title of Secretary of State in charge of Equality between Women and Men on Wednesday.
She celebrated by retweeting a message which said “the trolls will weep”.
***
That lead balloon will fly for sure this time. I can feel it.
Wait, they have a minister for gender equality? A, like, for real, paid-from-tax-money-with-a-staff-and-office-and-shit minister?
Wow. I respect the French’s ability to go all in. Commitment.
“they have a minister for gender equality?”
Heck, even Somalia has a Ministry of Women and Human Rights Development.
You can Google it.
this must be giving the SJW set in America the worst ladyboners
the idea of having a cabinet level job where they can smite their foes? (shuddergasm) DAMN YOU TO HELL TRUMP!! YOU STOLE THEIR FUTURE
Ladies and gents, the irreplaceable Mark Steyn
***
The social-justice crowd are moving toward the same point as the Charlie Hebdo killers, and for the same reason: They’re too stupid to argue. For the Islamic imperialists, debate is a largely alien concept. For the left, it’s simply too much effort. As I said here many years ago, the great appeal of multiculturalism is that it absolves you from having to know anything about other cultures: If they’re all equally valid, what’s the point? Slap on the CO-EXIST bumper sticker and off you tootle. No need to worry whether the “C” might have a bit of a problem with some of the other letters, and that indeed, if not for the “C”, you wouldn’t need a bumper-sticker admonition to CO-EXIST in the first place. But, after two generations of social engineering, of the substitution of attitudes for education, it would require too much effort to equip yourself to argue against the difficult questions a man such as Robert Spencer raises. It’s literally easier to kill him.
***
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2017/05/mark-steyn-the-poisoning-of-robert-spencer
First they ignore you- check
Then they laugh at you- check
Then they fight you- check
Then you win
Go fuck yourself, Jóhann. I hope you die from an overdose of methamphetamines.
Robert Spencer, well-known critic of Icelandic banking structure. Clearly what he’d be targeted for assassination over.
(Ignoring the idiocy of trying to cast this on a libertarian)
Maybe it was one of these guys:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_Society_of_Iceland
What exactly is a “bank loving libertarian”?
did any of them confuse this guy for Richard Spencer? I’m pretty sure i would have.
i mean, not on sight, but just on reputation.
Umm… so was he poisoned, or did he have a good time?
Hang the would-be assassin…and I don’t mean by the neck.
caption this picture
https://i5.s.heat.st/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/donald-trump-loves-trucks-6.jpg
“Piss on you, and piss on your law.”
“Sir, it’s the Deep State, they say try not to drive it under 50 mph…”
(Note: This comment about the Deep State was meant to be *critical* of the Deep State and their evil ways. Just to clarify)
“I’m from New York, WTF made you think I know how to drive?”
I need more pics of the girl in the main page picture for this article. Need.
Desperation isn’t a good look for you. Maybe you can find her based on the full image
It’s a beautiful world, I tell ya.
Needs more owl glasses.
I usually don’t like ink, but that’s some I could get behind.
parody: Sound of Social Justice
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cruRyoo2xiE
Today in Venezuela:
1. The socialism subreddit started a Venezuela megathread, in which they blame everybody but the Venezuelan government and socialism for Venezuela’s problems. They also pre-emptively banned everyone from /r/vzla, which is more or less a sub for Venezuelan ex-pats (let’s say that Maduro is not exactly popular there).
2. Venezuelan opposition leader Henrique Capriles, already banned from running for public office for 15 years, was supposed to meet with the UN today, until his passport was seized and won’t be given back until at least 2020. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-39970703
Socialist defending his subreddit:
Same guy said this. He’s really a true believer.
This guy is one of the greatest gold mines of derp I’ve ever seen. It’s actually impressive in a way.
https://www.reddit.com/user/Ligetxcryptid
Whoa there, Eddie, slow down with the self replying.
If you’re going to turn someone’s name into a term for “chronic self-replying”, i propose Ken instead of Eddie.
Ken is more a wall-of-text person to me, his self replies just add to the wall of textiness. Eddie is more long post with a bunch of staccato self-replies.
He’s the phil spector of comments
Its always the ‘designing’ part that they think matters so much.
Its this incredible intellectual hubris that assumes that “the reason things work, is because they were designed to work” . Not that “things adapted and adapted UNTIL they worked”
Tolstoy covered this a very long time ago when he pointed out “There are no communists.”
Why are these great ideas so hard to implement? Bizarre how no one can figure it out.
Chavestas policies weren’t properally implemented
Always the same fucking excuse.
I’m guessing it’s just this gif, plus ‘it’s la CIA’s fault’.
Awesome.
more socialist mental masturbation
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/05/imagining-the-end
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I blame Karl Marx for that, somewhat. Marx helped kill “utopian socialism” (my favorite kind of socialism). The utopian socialists used to actually dream of the kind of worlds they would create, conjuring elaborate and delightfully vivid visions of how a better and more humane world might actually operate. Some of these veered into the absurd (Charles Fourier believed the seas would turn to lemonade), but all of them encouraged people to actually think in serious detail about how human beings live now, and what it would be like if they lived differently. Marx, on the other hand, felt that this was a kind of foolishly romantic, anti-scientific waste of time. The task of the socialist was to discern the inexorable historical laws governing human social development, and then to hasten the advance of a revolution. According to Marx, it was pointless trying to spend time drawing up “recipes for the cook-shops of the future”; instead, left-wing thinkers should do as Marx believed he was doing, and confine themselves “to the mere critical analysis of actual facts.”
But analysis doesn’t actually create proposals, and it was because Marx believed that that things could sort themselves out “dialectically” that he didn’t think it was necessary to explain how communism might actually function day-to-day. Ironically, given Marx’s dictum that philosophers should attempt to change the world rather than merely interpreting it, Marx and his followers spent an awful lot of time trying to figure out social theories that would properly interpret the world, and precious little time trying to figure out what changes might actually improve people’s lives versus which changes might lead to disaster. (Call me crazy, but I believe this tendency to shun the actual development of policy might have been one reason why nearly every single government that has ever called itself Marxist has very quickly turned into a horror show.)
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Nothing says “delightfully vivid” like piles of corpses everywhere.
It goes so well with the drapes.
Charles Fourier, mentioned above
http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/lecture21a.html
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As a visionary, Fourier’s ideas seem quite fantastical and without ground in reality. Indeed, there is much in Fourier’s writing that is pure nonsense. Yes, like some of the representatives of the early French communist movement, Fourier exhibits that almost characteristic pretension of the visionary: contradictory, confused, repetitive, chaotic and, of course, long-winded. Reading Fourier after having read Marx and Engels, Fourier comes off as a confused thinker. For instance, Fourier’s passion for numbers led him to predict that the ideal world he was helping to create would last 80,000 years, 8,000 of them in an era of Perfect Harmony in which:
androgynous plants would copulate
six moons would orbit the earth
the North Pole would be milder than the Mediterranean
the seas would lose their salt and become oceans of lemonade
the world would contain 37 million poets equal to Homer, 37 million mathematicians equal to Newton and 37 million dramatists equal to Molière, although “these are approximate estimates”
every woman would have four lovers or husbands simultaneously
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I bet he fucking loved science.
Why does this lemonade ocean taste like blood?
Because the acidity killed all the fish. And everything else on land is dead, but that was in service to the glorious people’s revolution, and completely unconnected to the lemonade.
Sounds like he fucking loved hallucinogenics.
His ideas at least sound entertaining.
Sounds like a pretty run-of-the-mill psychotic. The hospital where I used to work has 20 or 30 of those people at any given time. It may seem exotic and interesting at first but it gets very tiresome very quickly. Also worth noting: the insane are invariably completely self-absorbed, something they have in common with SJW’s and other lefties. There is a lot of cross-over between the two groups, as in the Venn diagram looks like a circle.
Playoff hockey is awesome.
Playoff hockey was incredible (to a point) last year. Been fun to watch as a neutral observer this year. Hopefully it will be great again next year!
(Lightning fan)